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SUMMARY:Anxiety\, Profusion and the Nineteenth-Century Natural History Obj
 ect  - Dr Alison Wood (English\; Divinity\; Lucy Cavendish) 
DTSTART:20130424T110000Z
DTEND:20130424T130000Z
UID:TALK44485@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Ruth Rushworth
DESCRIPTION:Dr Alison Wood (English\; Divinity\; Lucy Cavendish) presents 
 at the CRASSH Postdoctoral Research Seminar.\n\nThe event is free to atten
 d but registration is required: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2441/\n
 \nAbstract\n\nWe are accustomed to speaking of the Victorian crisis of min
 d\; of considering nineteenth-century British culture as somehow in a stat
 e of – or responding to – political\, scientific or social tension. Th
 e burden of material and intellectual excess resonates in our scholarly co
 ncerns: from enduring interests in texts such as George Eliot’s Middlema
 rch or Mrs Humphrey Ward’s Robert Elsmere to the recent multitudinous an
 d careful studies of the many\, many things of Victorian culture – toys\
 , souvenirs\, gems\, specimens\, street lights\, ephemera. Central to this
  is the movement of objects\, particularly natural history objects – the
  specimen\, the taxonomic catalogue\, the expedition haul. Such abundance 
 was exhilarating and exhausting\, a burden and a possibility\, a source of
  anxiety and of crisis.\n\nI wonder then\, how this image of nineteenth ce
 ntury cultural life might be nuanced if profusion were considered a functi
 on as well as source of anxiety. How\, in terms of nineteenth-century natu
 ral history\, did anxiety serve as intellectual constraint\, fuel and fram
 e? For the ordering and naming of natural things multiplied via trade\, vi
 a oceanographic expedition and the flourishing – or spawning – of natu
 ral history societies and interests. But it also multiplied because of an 
 anxious and pleasure-driven desire to know. In this paper I want to sketch
  some varieties of anxiety as they relate to the work of natural history a
 nd the intellectual fascinations of its observers and orderers. Where obje
 cts (many\, many objects) and the work of classification collide there is 
 an unexplored fissure: that in all of this thing-li-ness\, anxiety meets p
 leasure meets a process for making knowledge. And it is that fissure that 
 fuels my investigation.
LOCATION:CRASSH\, Alison Richard Building\, 7 West Road\, Cambridge\, CB3 
 9DT
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